I will admit, I’m not a fan of having my own photo taken. The whole process is very uncomfortable and I’m often too hard on myself when I see the end result, so I am very understanding if someone wouldn’t want me to take their photo. However, as a media practitioner I can recognise that for someone like Vivian Maier who so obviously had an incredibly creative vision and what I believe she often followed Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ technique, that it would be difficult to snap such amazing photos if she had stopped and asked if it was ok and then try to recreate her initial vision again. The moment would be gone and the potential photo wasted.

 

 

This photo, for example, is one of my favourites. I think the composition and the lighting is stunning and it really tells a story for whoever were to chose to interpret it, but I could imagine the lady wouldn’t be so flattered. She looks wealthy, with her fur coat and dark lips, perhaps she a high-ranking New York socialite. We don’t know. I think he expression is a mix of startled and disapproving and I’d imagine she probably said something to Maier once the photo had been taken. There is no denying that it is a beautiful constructed photo but is invading someones space and privacy ethical? I’m still not convinced. In this modern era with iPhones, social media, memes and cancel culture, the willingness of people to have their photo taken whether is be portrait style or street photography is dwildlling. Lake (2014) referenced a lady in London who had felt “hurt and humiliated” when she discovered a photo of herself eating a salad on a Facebook group called ‘Women Who Eat on the Tube’.  Understandable I think, and the amount of pages like this has only increased since 2014.

For the exercise this week, we were required to go out and take twelve portraits of strangers. I really struggled with this and didn’t feel comfortable approaching strangers to take their photo. I really did feel like I was invading their privacy. I asked maybe three or so people on the street and all rejected me pretty quickly so my confidence lacked even more after that. I decided to head to my work and take some snaps of my colleagues.

They’re not great….

I don’t think that I will be choosing a street photographer or a photographer renowned for taking portraits as my inspiration for the Memesis assignment .

References:

Jessica Lake 2014, ‘Is it OK for people to take pictures of you in public and publish them?’ The Conversation, blog post, 27 May, viewed 16 November 2020, <https://theconversation.com/is-it-ok-for-people-to-take-pictures-of-you-in-public-and-publish-them-27098>.

 

Blog Posts

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

The only photos I would usually edit would be photos that I was going to post on my social medias and I would use apps such as Lightroom, Afterlight and VSCO. That being said however, I’ve always been quite cautious when editing in fear that I would overdo it and the photos would look tacky. I find that these days our feeds are littered with filtered photos and sometime you can get lost in what is real and what is not. When I do edit, I tend to play around with the light affects such as exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows and maybe alter the sharpening but I would very rarely alter the colour affects such as temp, vibrance or saturation purely because I don’t feel confident enough to do it. Today exercise was to play around on Lightroom Classic and create two versions of one photo: a slightly altered one and a noticeably yet creatively altered one. I found it a lot easier to only slightly alter the photo because I relied on what would still be considered ‘realistic’ but I found it really hard to noticeably alter the photo without making it look tacky. In my first attempt below, I tried to work with colour to make it more interesting to look at but reflecting the green from the book onto the back wall.

In my second attempt, I played with colour again and created a sort of geometrical alien world. I also took on some advice from Jamie Winsdor in the video we watched, 6 things you SHOULD be doing when EDITING PHOTOS, where he said not to be afraid of cropping to create a better photo.

 

He provided an an interesting way to think about cropping when he used an example of a girl standing alone on a kitchen and when he cropped it so she was in the background and there was empty space in the foreground, it created a sense of familiarity with the subject however when the photo was cropped so she was in the foreground and the empty space was in the background, it created a sense of mystery. Crazy how you can create two different stories from one photo just by simply cropping. He also touched on starting with altering the white balance on your photos before doing any other editing to get the correct feel for the photo that you are looking for, which as I mentioned above I’m a bit nervous doing that but he provided a great demonstration and he also touched on how it can be beneficial to selectively alter the exposure of different areas of a photo to highlight specific elements. The main thing I really liked from the video was that one of his tips was to take a break when editing photos and came back to it with fresh eyes  so you can see what you’ve missed or what you’ve overdone – I think I would have benefited from this tip when I was completing the exercise.

Reference:

Jamie Windsor 2019, 6 things you SHOULD be doing when EDITING PHOTOS, YouTube video, viewed 10 November 2020, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX8dkkqF9eE&t=6s&ab_channel=JamieWindsor>

“Photography as art or photography as social practice” (Zylinska, 2016, p. 8) is an interesting way to categorise photography although I think it is outdated. The reading this week discussed how photography had been revolutionised by the broadband connection of our cameras to the internet and in particular our smartphones, which almost everyone now has.  It also discussed this concept of ‘photomediations’ in which I think Zylinska is referring to that space somewhere between photography as art and as social practice. She continues on to say, “it is a complex and hybrid process that is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological, and technical.” (2016, p. 12)

The platform that came to mind when reflecting on this concept was Instagram as it’s a photo sharing platform that relies on the Internet and has evolved to incorporate all those aforementioned. As Instagram is first and foremost a social media platform that aims to connect friends and family by the use of sharing photos and videos this in turn can make it a social practice and it is a space where anyone can snap and upload photos that express their creative skills and imagination which is the basics of ‘art’. Its economic in the sense that photographers whether they be professional or amateur can commercialise on their content, its psychological in the sense that the photos we see on Instagram can change the way we see/think/feel and technical in the sense that it’s mostly digital photography that requires editing and often needs to fit the aesthetic of their profile grid. As you can see below, I’ve added examples of two Instagram accounts that are run by professional photographers and two examples of Instagram accounts that are amateur photographers. Although the top two accounts would typically be considered photography as art and the bottom two would be considered photography so cal practice, all accounts show photography as a hybrid of the two that takes careful consideration of their colour schemes and composition and incorporate technical aspect and can  therefore be categorised as photomediations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the prompt for this week was “how to get the most from our cameras”, 100 shots around the block required us to to put our cameras into manual mode and take a bunch of photos by adjusting the ISO, AP and SS to get the perfect shot. I thought I was going to have to download an app and use my iPhone XR but I found my dads Nikon Coolpix S9900 so decided to give that a go and honestly,  I really struggled to work out the settings on the camera to start with. Once I thought I had the hang of it I set off on a walk, but I’m currently in Cairns and the sun is BLINDING here and every photo I took came out as a white screen. I decided to head home and try and take a few pictures around the house to get my bearings with the camera. None of my photos came out particularly well but I’m excited to improve.  I found the video that we watched of Sean Tucker explaining the logistics of manual mode very helpful although it was very hard to get my head around the whole process. I think I’ll be referring to the below image as reference a lot of the next few weeks.

References:

Zylinska, J., 2016. Photomediations: An Introduction. eader K

Recently I had to do a clean up of my photo library on my Mac, to open up a bit of storage space, and found over 20,000 photos. They were from as early at 2011 and had just accumulated through my iCloud and had been laid to rest on my poor hard drive. So of course, I had to go through one by one to see what photos were worth keeping and what photos were a waste of space – a tedious task I might add. The longer I spent doing it the more I wondered: why had I taken half of these photos in the first place and why did I need them now? They were no sight to behold and very rarely did I correlate any memory to them, but it has become instinct almost to take out your phone and snap photos of everywhere you go. The reading today by Susan Sontag (1978, p. 6) reminded me of this when she said, “photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had”. It made me laugh to think that this was written in the 70’s before camera phones and before social media and yet it seems the ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ mentality has been engrained in us perhaps since the invention of the first camera!

I would like to be more aware of my photography and how I use up all my storage. A well articulated and creative photo feels like a much better use of my space than 20+ photos of my cat sleeping. Although he is cute and I actually on reflection there I have no regrets. Today was the second time watching the interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson called The Decisive Moment and I’ve been inspired both times. I enjoy his use of geometry and the care he takes when he takes portrait shots. The quote of his that sticks out for me when I think about the way he explains his photography is, “Life is once, forever”, which I think perfectly sums up what he described as the decisive moment, you have to be quick and trust the process because the world doesn’t stop for anyone. For my
self-portrait exercise, I tried to incorporate the use of geometry to create a more interesting photo and also tried to work with the colour schemes available as seen below.

 

 

References

Sontag, S. (1978). Susan Sontag on photography. London, Great Britain: Allen Lane.